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The person seems to have got a 1TB expander by mistake before it was meant to be released to the market. It is being reported as an unsupported device,,, which is a good thing in my mind.

I have an idea which may not be correct but follow me. 11.0C just came out. I doubt TiVo is going to release another update soon. The 1TB drive has been in the works for a while. The person connected it and it says unsupported. This leads me to believe the supported drive list is not part of the OS but rather some entry in the database which is not protected by the Prom/Kernel. If that is the case you can see I am hinting at a script that could be run on the PC to add more drives to the list and allow "unsupported" drives to work on an unprommed unit.

In researching unsupported drives in the past most evidence points to the idea that the enclosure is nothing special and its just the drive firmware reporting a serial/model/secret number to the TiVO.

I've got two S3 Tivos with Fantom 1TB external drives attached and they're working just fine. Both S3's have had their internal drives upgraded to 500GB and 750GB. I've been running dual drive Tivo setups for almost 10 years and I've only had one hard drive failure that caused me any data loss in all that time, and I believe the drive that failed was the OEM drive that came with the Tivo. I've literally owned several dozen Tivos of all varieties over that period. In other words, there's no real reason to be concerned about data loss or drive failures by adding a 2nd drive. You stand just as much chance of a drive failure with a single drive as you do with two.

Please don't PM me or any other members looking for personal assistance. You'll do better by posting (after you've exhausted the search feature, of course) and taking advantage of the collective expertise of the membership instead of a single individual that may or may not be able to help you. Thank you and enjoy your stay at DDB!

but I'm not sure how someone with an unhacked TiVo could easily dbset the change to SringData in /Table/DriveInfo in the mfs?

Couldn't it work similar to Toshiba_unlock / sd-h400_unlock ? Think of it like the QAM mapping service that was offered on DDB. That was for people who didn't hack their unit.

If you did modify this entry wouldn't it survive an update since it is outside the "OS?"

Originally Posted by captain_video

A single drive is definitely preferable in most cases, except when you need more capacity than the current single drive limitation imposed by the OS.

For the TiVo HD you can use the TiVo HD XL image I created and then expand it to fill a 2TB drive. For the S3 you should be able to use the instructions in the MFS from scratch thread to create your own 2TB drive.

Originally Posted by captain_video

I record HD content almost exclusively so even large drives get filled up in short order.

I feel you. It is the only reason I upgraded to 2TB and even that is not enough anymore. My suggestions folder and recently deleted are both empty right now!

If anyone is willing to write this software I have three THD at my disposal to test with. One with two internal 1TB drives, a second one with a 1tb drive and a third unit with no modifications at all. I would very much prefer to use the first unit I mentioned even if it means putting my original 160gb drive back in.

If the tool is created a feature request I have is that it would scan a specified drive for the exact ID needed. For example "mfs_drive_add /dev/hdc -a /dev/sda" where HDA is the internal tivo drive and SDA is the new esata unit.

Originally Posted by petestrash

If you are pulling the internal anyway, why not just marry the two at that time? Then you are not at risk of TiVo restoring the modified MFS entry.

LOL I guess that is true but the drive ID entry method would allow you to remove a failed drive without taking the unit apart! The "official" drive support works really well when it comes to failures. It allows the box to continue working and EVEN play back shows that were recorded before the drive was added.

I don't have any experience with recent failures (touch wood), but many years of failures using dual drives in S1's (not just the deathstar's), when there was no choice but to have multiple drives for decent capacity.

When I have had single drive failures, I have been able to recover most of the shows, but lost everything when dual drives fail.

With single drives now being so large, why take the risk? The TiVo interface is not that great when you have hundreds of files anyway.

Might not be such a problem with today's drives, but I also only keep them in TiVo's 3-4 years now just to be safe.

Peter.

Edit, added Australian TiVo HD StringData. Seems to confirm that they as planning to only supply 1Gb extenders here.

With single drives now being so large, why take the risk? The TiVo interface is not that great when you have hundreds of files anyway.

Might not be such a problem with today's drives, but I also only keep them in TiVo's 3-4 years now just to be safe.

Peter.

A single drive is definitely preferable in most cases, except when you need more capacity than the current single drive limitation imposed by the OS. Personally, I don't like the idea of having more recordings stored on a drive than I'll ever have time to watch. However, with the number of season passes I have and the current schedule I keep, it's almost impossible for me to keep up with all the shows I record. The upside is that when my favorite programs go into reruns, I still have lots of new episodes to watch.

I hesitated for a long time before deciding to go with the external storage on both my S3's. The clincher was when shows started getting deleted from the upgraded drives before I had a chance to watch them. I record HD content almost exclusively so even large drives get filled up in short order.

Please don't PM me or any other members looking for personal assistance. You'll do better by posting (after you've exhausted the search feature, of course) and taking advantage of the collective expertise of the membership instead of a single individual that may or may not be able to help you. Thank you and enjoy your stay at DDB!